Hi RWB and welcome to the LitePlacer community - I also read your other posts and will reply as soon as I find the time
Regarding the camera:
In my opinion, the USB borescope cameras which Juha includes in the kit are a compromise between price and image quality. Juha probably chose them to keep the machine affordable and easy to build.
I trust they work fine for needle alignment and fiducial recognition - but once it comes to more elaborate computer vision they will fall short.
Image resolution, light sensitivity, auto exposure, noise etc. are all not very good on those cheap USB borescope cams.
The image quality of a C270 webcam (or better camera with HD resoltion) will be much better. Surprisingly, this relatively cheap webcam has a good CMOS sensor, nice controller and even the optics are almost perfect for the upwards camera.
Check this thread to find a few more pictures:
http://liteplacer.com/phpBB/viewtopic.p ... rt=10#p230
Camera chip is only one aspect; lighting is almost as important for computer vision. I chose red LED to elminiate or reduce the influence of ambient light and this worked well so far. Also, the hexagonal LED boards which are tilted at an calculated angle illuminate the components very evenly and without shadows.
I will likely change to white light though, as I plan to upgrade to Juki nozzles and these have a green vision shield which can be eliminated in image processing using chroma-key techniques.
For the downcam I am using the Andonstar USB microscope which thereza recommended. Make sure to get the 2MP (or better) version if you decide to go down the same route. It is not cheap (around USD 60 from China) but well worth the money.
Best regards
Malte